Along Old Glenn Highway, homeowners worried

They and about 50 other Butte residents who have signed a petition want to know why the Mat-Su Borough and state officials allowed a 2,000-foot-long rock levee built in the mid-1980s to become so eroded by the shifting, powerful river that homes and businesses in the area could become flooded in the near future.

Although residents say the river has been slowly eating away at the bank for the last few years, heavy rains this summer seem to be accelerating the problem. This past month a half-acre portion of the embankment -- between the end of the Maud Road service road and the service road running parallel to the river -- disappeared into the river. The two roads no longer connect, and the gap between the river and a neighborhood of $300,000 homes is closing.

"It's a shame for Alaska, with all its tourism and oil revenues, that this would happen," said Amir Lena, who built a large log house on 21 acres between the river and the Old Glenn in the last few years, only to recently realize it might soon be under water. "We've already lost 150 feet of our property off Maud Road in just the last two months."

Running alongside Lena's property is a drainage ditch that also borders the Rival Park Motorcross track, which meanders through the hilly woods. Monday night, there was only a few feet between a bend in the river and the edge of that ditch.

"Once the water hits that ditch, it's going to go all the way to the highway and across to the rest of the properties on the other side," said Lena's next door neighbor Clint Nelson, whose 6,000-square-foot home at the end of Ye Olde River Road has been in his family since he was a young boy in 1975. "Then it's all over but the crying."

Nelson and his wife, Christine, also own Encore Mechanical just north of their home. They and other long-time Butte residents Brit Lively and Suzanne McCausland are spearheading the effort to get some action from local officials.

Nelson, who remembers hunting rabbits as a boy along an area the river has washed away, urged the group gathered at his home Monday to contact state Rep. Bill Stoltze for funding assistance to fix the levee.

Stoltze sent an aide to survey the area a couple of weeks ago and the aide contacted officials at the borough's Public Works department. Neither Stoltze nor his aide could be reached for comment Tuesday.

Others, like Scott Easler, who owns a retirement cabin that is now only 75 feet from the river's edge, want to follow recommendations by borough environmental planner Frankie Barker to form a service area to build and maintain dikes, such as the service area farther south in the Circle View area of Butte.

"If that's what she says we should do, then let's do it," Easler said.

Borough officials said Tuesday that just rebuilding the Maud Road levee, made of large rocks known as riprap, could cost up to $4 million. And to build a new, 3.5-mile dike from the George Palmer bridge at Mile 17 of the Old Glenn to Mile 13 would cost an estimated $30 million to build and $172,000 annually to maintain.

Nelson said he thinks that's all grandiose and that the answer for now is simpler: Bring in a few hundred truckloads of large rock to fill in the portions of lost land to keep the river from chewing through any more of it.

"That may sound like a good idea but the borough can't do it," said Lynne Woods, borough deputy mayor. "It's not a question of money, it's a question of authority. Right now we have no water erosion and flood control powers. We cannot take action by ourselves. That authority rests with the state of Alaska unless a service area is created."

Woods added she hopes that when the borough's draft Matanuska River Management Plan is considered by the borough Assembly Sept. 21, borough officials and residents will be able to figure out how best to handle the situation in the Butte.

The last of five dikes built in the Circle View and Stampede Estates service area several years ago cost about $580,000 in federal funds. Residents agreed to pay extra property taxes to help build and maintain the structures that protect their homes off Bodenburg Loop.

But the Nelsons, who already pay $5,000 a year in property taxes, don't favor the idea of being taxed even more to protect their home.

"What are we getting for those taxes?" Christine Nelson wondered. "We've got a road with potholes in it, so I'm not sure we're seeing $5,000 worth of services."

Find K.T. McKee online at adn.com/contact/kmckee or call 352-6711.